


some say, "it's down below there," and we can only believe them

by scherzo_di_notte



Series: team gummiship [3]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Please read the notes!, ansem the wise isn't actually here but he sure is hanging over this story like a stormcloud, radiant garden sucks everybody
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 15:52:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19112890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scherzo_di_notte/pseuds/scherzo_di_notte
Summary: Having seen the darker side of Radiant Garden, Apprentice Xehanort and what remains of the previous tenant come to a tentative kind of understanding.A companion to "at night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam", won't make much sense without it.





	some say, "it's down below there," and we can only believe them

**Author's Note:**

> We're getting into heavy headcanon territory here, so please turn back if implications of sexual abuse are triggering to you.
> 
> So the fact that Ansem the Wise has a massive painting of Xehanort in his office, and ONLY Xehanort, has always struck me as extremely weird and creepy, and this resulted.

The thief is pacing again, pacing across one side of the office—and then he pauses, and rifles through the bookshelf, or stands before the tanks where captured hearts bob serenely in formalin, and lays his hand there—for a moment, though, before lacing his hands behind his back and flitting away, striding with some unknown purpose for the chalkboard, the door, the desk.

Nothing of him will ever _sit still_ , not even his hands, twining and flexing in infinite complexity.

His shadow, however, remains fixed in place, utterly silent. It tears its gaze away from the thief only for its attention to drift to the portrait on the wall. No matter where it looks, it can't stop seeing that face. The same curve of the cheek, the same fey point to the ear, the same hair white as winter and skin deep as autumn. The same dreamer's eyes, each long lash immortalized in perfect oil—if not the same color.

No, ah, no, the portrait's eyes are dark as the shadow's once had been, but the thief's eyes are the same color as his shadow's are now, the bright gold of things which hide in darkness.

—the shadow cannot keep calling him _thief_ . What was his name? Is it losing its mind? Is this how it's going to be? The thief recalling more and more, the shadow less and less. It scrabbles at the memory of that name. It is going to _need_ that name, someday, to spit in contempt across a battleground—

_Xe—ha—nort._

The shadow must have a tongue—must have had a tongue—it can recall the taste of that name on his tongue, anyhow, thick as paint. Xehanort's own lips and teeth and throat had not frozen and cracked and fallen off in shame to call himself by that name, so—it must be the thief's heart in there, in that puppet which had once been the shadow's own. It must.

Only—

How Xehanort had _looked_ at it, his eyes alive with a fierce golden need as he had laid his hand upon the window. That hunger hadn't been the desperation of an old man at death's door. That hunger needed _it_ , its ear, its voice, its thoughts and feelings and memories, and not merely its shell.

—so whose hunger had it been? Who is _left_ in there, if not the old man?

"Not much longer," says Xehanort, to nobody at all, and then he makes a small, shrill noise something like a laugh, "Ansem will be back soon—" and—his hand is halfway to the chalkboard when it stops, fingers curling inward like the legs of a dying insect, coiling into a tight ball of a fist in the fabric of his coat, (his fine white coat, which is already stained invisibly, indelibly, with months and months of fingerprints from chalk-dusted hands).

"I think he suspects me," he says, in a voice like a dead man's, even as his hands, his ever-clever hands, twitch and tear at one another. "But I can’t stop. I can’t stop, not now. There’s something—there must be something buried in—in here—" he leaves a streak of white across his temple, as he rubs his hands over his face—"something he won’t see coming."

His head jerks upward and turns. Yellow eyes meet yellow eyes, and then dart away. "...I don't know why I'm telling you this," he says, "you've never answered before, why now?"

 _I can't_ , the shadow does not say.

"I know you're there," quietly, now, "you're always there."

 _I am_ , the shadow does not say.

—it is here because there is nowhere else it can possibly be. It is sewn inextricably into the soles of Xehanort's feet; it is only a shadow, and shadows cannot run, cannot protest. They can only watch, shrinking as their hosts curl inward upon themselves, or contorting as the shadows of others bleed into them.

"I don't know what he's going to do."

The shadow cannot even conceive of an answer to that.

" _Help me,_ " he says, and if there is something of the old man there, the old master, it is something that must have been dead and buried for—a long time, a _long_ time, because it is nothing the shadow recognizes.

Xehanort's hands, his deft, skillful, stolen hands, are shaking like falling leaves.

The shadow holds out its own, high and parallel to the ground, as though reaching for a weapon, or a lifeline. Xehanort follows suit.

There is a flash. Its hand remains empty. Xehanort's does not.

The blade fits his hand perfectly. It always has.

 

* * *

 

(a coda:

"Do you believe he regrets it, truly, my Guardian?" says Ansem to his shadow, as they stand upon the sea-strand. For a given value of _stand_. The Guardian coils out from beneath his feet, and stretches its limbs out in the starless night.

They come here to think, sometimes. The sound of the waves is... nostalgic, Ansem says, and here in the realm of darkness, the Guardian finds itself—somewhat more lucid than otherwise.

—Though it stares blankly at Ansem's back, now. He glances over his shoulder, and tilts his head up in acknowledgement. "The experiments."

The stars of the Guardian's eyes dim, slightly, as Ansem's words drag through the clouded black mire of its thoughts. After a long hesitation, it nods.

"Or do you think..." Ansem chuckles, humorlessly. "Do you believe, perhaps, they were just another leash he thought to draw me up short by. A toy he could give and take as he pleased, as I pleased him, as it pushed me toward my fate, away from him."

A tilt of the head, as the Guardian gazes toward the horizon, far across the sea. Ansem _hmm_ s softly and walks away along the lapping waves. He bends, briefly, to pluck a sliver of steel from the sand.

Steel, or the idea of steel, worked into the shape of a white feather, twisted where it was torn away from its mooring.

"...but it is so very late for any of us to regret what we became, is it not," says Ansem.)

**Author's Note:**

> terra has brown eyes here because eye colors other than blue exist, nomura,


End file.
